The War in Afghanistan Comes Home
The War in Afghanistan Comes Home
by Matt, What About the Roads?
August 17, 2021
The story of the “end” of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan isn’t just about the end of the conflict there, it’s also about where it’s headed next. The Pentagon didn’t spend $2 trillion over 20 years to just walk away from one of the most valuable squares on the geopolitical chessboard empty handed. The possibility for full scale re-entry into the country is always there but in the meantime, there are plenty of lessons the Pentagon learned there that they’ll be employing stateside.
In the time since we published last week’s story on Biden’s wars, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated rapidly. American troops have already been redeployed as the Taliban stormed across the country to recapture the capital, the U.S.-back president has fled the country, and tragic scenes like those from the airport in Kabul are once again being broadcast to the world. Soon, the U.S.-created Al-Qaida may even be making a comeback.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. For millennia, Afghanistan has been a coveted piece of land which many have attempted to conquer but none have been able to subdue entirely. The Mongols, Persians, and Greeks all briefly absorbed Afghanistan into their ancient empires before ultimately withdrawing. In more recent history the British, Soviets, and now, Americans, have also been forced to make hasty retreats from the unconquerable nation, leaving rival factions to vie for power in their absence.
Knowing this, it’s reasonable to ask why the US and NATO would try yet again. Why lie about there being a connection between Osama bin Laden and the events of 9/11 in order to fight yet another battle for control over the graveyard of empires? A battle, history has proven, one is sure to lose.
One simple answer is that invasion of foreign lands usually enriches a select few of the invaders. Afghanistan sits on a reported $1 trillion worth of rare earth minerals ripe for exploitation by Western corporations. The lucrative opium trade has been helped along by the CIA throughout the U.S. occupation (but who needs opium and heroin when you have fentanyl). Military contractors and weapons manufacturers have handsomely racked in windfall profits at the expense of the Afghan people.
Then there’s the geopolitical power that comes with controlling Afghanistan. “Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power,” globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski reminded the world in his 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard. One of America’s grand ambitions in the country is to run a natural gas pipeline through it which would bypass Iran and Russia, breaking their co-monopoly on regional energy supplies. U.S. occupation of Afghanistan has also put a damper on China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative, but with a potential departure of American troops China’s ambitions in the country are quickly on the rise. The encirclement of Iran is made possible by continued occupation as well.
Another major reason to be in Afghanistan all this time has been made explicitly clear in the past few days. The military is going to take all the lessons it learned there and use them at home.
Again, this isn’t anything new. The U.S. military and their cohorts in the intelligence agencies have a thorough track records of testing things out on foreign populations before turning their eyes back on the domestic population. Chemical weapons used on the battlefield of Europe during World War I were eventually used at home on unknowing Americans. Intelligence spooks who’d spent years disrupting, infiltrating, sabotaging, and ultimately destroying Communist groups abroad deployed those same tactics against Americans who were opposed to “the Vietnam War, segregation, and other injustices.” During the Vietnam War, there were frightening parallels between the horrors being carried out by CIA-created assassins as part of the Phoenix Program and the serial killers stalking America, many of whom had deep military and intelligence ties. Then of course during the so-called War on Terror, Americans and the people in the counties being occupied had their civil liberties eroded greatly in the name of stopping the terrorist boogeymen.
This brings us to today. While Trump made sure that the might of the military-industrial-complex never faltered abroad, other social engineers were busy conditioning a domestic audience that the dangers posed by domestic extremists had never been greater. In Trump’s America, the rise of right wing “white supremacists” and “extremists” were once again touted as threatening to undo everything the great American experiment had worked so hard to create.
With the stage set it was easy for the powers that shouldn’t be to find an easy scapegoat to blame the failures of masking and lockdowns on during the COVID-19 pandemic that wasn’t. These selfish anti-science cretins were more concerning than the virus itself and their red state leaders like Ron DeSantis, and Kristie Noem were only egging them on by not locking them indoors and shutting down the local economy. When these “extremists” weren’t protesting against draconian government mandates they were committing non-stop hate crimes at a time against Black Lives Matters and Stop Asian Hate supports were having their fiery but mostly peaceful gatherings.
This narrative has only grown stronger under the Biden administration as lack of “vaccinations” and subsequent COVID “variants” are being blamed on these domestic threats. Couple this with the renewal of anti-American sentiment abroad on the eve of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and you get the Department of Homeland Security issuing a new terror threat alert which warns of “racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists” who “view the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.” The DHS also notes their concern over “conspiracy theories on perceived election fraud and alleged reinstatement, and responses to anticipated restrictions relating to the increasing COVID cases” which are perpetuated by “Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked media outlets.”
If you have take any issue with the government reinstating lockdowns, bringing back mask mandates, or requiring experimental injections for participating in society then you are morally on par with the Taliban. If you doubt that Joe Biden received more votes than any other president in history then you are a white supremacist. If you have any questions about the official narrative surrounding the so-called pandemic you may be a dastardly Russian-Chinese-Iranian operative. Whatever the case, if any of this applies to you, the U.S. government now considers you a domestic terrorist threat.
What we can ultimately glean from this newly issued alert is that dark days lie ahead. We can be almost certain that totalitarian restrictions will remerge across the country and we should expect violent retaliation against such measures from both state actors and well-meaning, but fed up people. In the fallout from this, even more mandates, restrictions, and lockdowns (maybe worse) will be instated to deal with these terrorist threats. Problem, reaction, solution.
In these dark times however, we can still work towards growing and building a better future. Groups across the country work towards intervening in their local political scene to prevent or outlaw COVID-19 restrictions from ever coming back. Freedom cells and mutual aid societies continue to spring up and provide alternative for those of us tired of living in a society that would rather see us destroyed or dead. Millions are voting with their feet and relocating to areas with more freedom-oriented communities. None of these are silver bullet solutions but the one sure way to bring about this apocalypse is to do nothing about it.